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Amid losses, Japan determined to reopen schools

ISHINOMAKI, Japan (AP) - The tsunami killed 74 of the 108
students at Okawa Elementary School and all but one of the dozen
teachers. The main building is ripped open, with trees jammed into
second-floor classrooms, and the gym and playground have been
reduced to muddied concrete foundations.

Classes start in a week.

All along Japan's battered northeastern coast, schools have been
heavily damaged or converted to shelters, and families are without
jobs, permanent homes or cars. But the country is determined to
move ahead with one of its rites of spring: the start of the school
year in April, even as some parents and children grieve.

"I'm just not ready to think about school yet. They haven't
even found my daughter," said Naomi Hiratsuka, who lost her child
Koharu, a sixth grader at Okawa Elementary, and has a younger one
entering first grade.

Officials say establishing routines is a crucial step in
rebuilding communities and drawing residents out of crisis mode.
The 34 surviving students of Okawa Elementary will begin classes on
April 21 in four rooms at a nearby school, staying together and
treated as a separate school of their own.

"We don't know yet if the school can be rebuilt, but we want to
maintain continuity for the students," says Kato Shigemi, an
education committee official in Ishinomaki, a devastated riverside
community about 220 miles (350 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo.

The damage to the school system is immense. In Fukushima,
Miyagi, and Iwate prefectures, which bore the brunt of the damage
from the March 11 disaster, more than 1,000 students and teachers
are dead or missing, out of an overall death toll that could top
25,000. To help deal with the mental strain, psychologists and
school counselors from around the country are being trained and
sent to the hardest-hit areas.

Classrooms will be crowded. Nearly 200 schools require
replacement or major renovations, and thousands more need repairs.
Hundreds are being used as shelters, mainly their gyms and assembly
halls.

School buildings survived in the coastal city of Natori, but
some students had already been picked up by their parents and were
swept away, said Nobou Takizawa, an education official.

The city is arranging special buses to stop at shelters around
Natori, he said. Classes will start about 10 days later than
normal, and many schools will share buildings, as well as handle
students from the shelters.

Any delay could set back the future of young survivors. The
education system has clearly defined targets for each grade - such
as mastering hundreds of "kanji," the written characters in the
Japanese language - that lead to crucial university entrance exams.
Skipping or repeating a grade is rare.

Days after the disaster, teachers visited shelters, checking on
their students and even handing out homework assignments.

At Okawa Elementary, another issue is trust.

Parents are frustrated at the lack of an explanation for its
tragedy, when other schools nearby were also heavily damaged but
had no deaths. A month after the disaster, relatives of the
deceased still gather near the city's wreckage to mourn and peer
into trucks that drive by with recovered bodies to check for their
children.

"After the quake, I heard there would be a tsunami, but she was
at the elementary school, so I thought she would be safe," says
Katsura Sato of her daughter Mizuho, another sixth grader who died.
"I just want to know how she spent her last minutes."

According to city and school officials, teachers told students
to get under their desks when the earthquake hit, then led them
outside to the playground, as they had been trained. The next step
was to seek higher ground, but fallen trees blocked the way up a
steep mountain, so after debating for several minutes they started
heading toward an elevated bridge a short distance away.

Whether any got as far as the bridge is unclear, but the tsunami
was far worse than expected two miles (3.2 kilometers) from the
ocean. The nearby river flooded, swamping the two-story school and
snapping off a large-section of the steel, two-lane bridge.

Of the 34 surviving students, 26 had been picked up by their
parents before the tsunami came. Seven others were somehow swept to
safety while the other was rescued by Junji Endo, the lone
surviving teacher.

Debris from the school - a chalkboard, a miniature baseball bat,
a single blue boot - is strewn across its former sports field,
along with crumpled cars and wrecked buildings.

Last Saturday, 97 relatives attended a meeting with school and
city officials, who apologized for the tragedy. Reporters weren't
allowed inside, but attendees said parents fired off angry
questions and got few answers.

Endo, still in shock and recovering from a dislocated elbow and
frostbite in his feet, spoke briefly but then broke down sobbing
and couldn't answer any questions, according to Shigemi, the
education committee official.

Many relatives were visibly angry or crestfallen and didn't stop
to talk to the media. Others were more understanding.

"For a disaster this big, these things can't be helped," said
Souta Sasaki, 15, the son of a second-grade teacher who was one of
the victims.

In Rikuzentakata, another tsunami-hit city, Chihiro Osaka could
be forgiven if he stares out the window when classes start on April
20.

The field where the 14-year-old once played forward for the
soccer team has become a base for the recovery effort. Rows of
temporary housing have been built, camouflage military supply
trucks come and go and a circle of older evacuees gathers daily
around a fire in a metal barrel. A row of media satellite trucks
sits in front of a toppled goal post, and the bicycle parking is a
makeshift kennel for rescued pets.

Osaka has homework over the break but hasn't started it yet.
Even with all the distractions, he is looking forward to class.

"There's just nothing to do," he said. "I always said how
much I hated school, but I guess you need it."